Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  33

  AT FIRST IT didn’t seem all that hard to figure out, but the only thing Steven came up with that made any sense didn’t make any sense. Father Jim had loved Eddie, probably more than anybody except maybe Mom. No way he could have killed him.

  But how else did you figure it?

  The day before, when Pop and Eddie had had that big fight about Hitler and doing the right thing, Steven remembered clearly enough—Eddie coming into his room afterward, really ticked off at Pop.

  “He teaches you one thing, and then when it’s time to do something about it he says forget it.”

  “So? What do you expect?” he’d said to Eddie.

  And Eddie going, “I don’t know. Something.”

  “What? From adults?”

  “Hey, I’m an adult.”

  “You’re a dork.”

  “You’re the dork. What would you do?”

  That was Eddie. Like his kid brother’s advice really counted. But he hadn’t had any advice to give. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I’ll ask Father Jim.” Eddie seeing the face he made and saying, “What’s the matter with him now? It’s getting so you think something’s wrong with everybody.”

  “He’s okay.”

  “But you don’t really think so?”

  “I’m getting that way with everybody, ’cause everybody’s that way.”

  “Not Father Jim, Steven.”

  “Doesn’t he make you sort of nervous? A little, even? You know, when he flips out, like?”

  Eddie had laughed. “That’s not flipping out, it’s just letting go a little. It’s harmless. Even a priest can be too serious all the time.”

  “Sometimes it just makes me a little nervous, is all.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re not very mature.” But teasing, kidding. Then saying, “I’m gonna call him.”

  So right there, in that bedroom, Eddie had called and talked to Father Jim, making an appointment to see him the next night. The night he’d been killed.

  And Steven remembering that only now. And Eddie had kept the appointment—how else could Father know about Frannie being pregnant? Then Father went to where he kept the gun?

  (He, Eddie and Father had gone shooting enough times below Candlestick. Like the switchblade, or the races down Highway 1 just flying along against the ocean, it was one of those secrets between Father Jim, Eddie and himself. Mick had never made the cut—he was too uptight. The secret things about Father Jim had been another of the bonds between Eddie and himself. )

  It was still too far a stretch to imagine Father Jim thinking he was going to kill Eddie, or wanting to, but he could play with it for a minute, see where it led him. . . . Eddie had gone to visit Father, thinking about this problem he was having with a guy from work. (Steven wished he had paid more attention about the details of that, but it had just been another thing Eddie was doing.) Then Father might have said that meeting a guy alone at night, trying to mess with his business, might be dangerous. He’d go along as moral support, and also, just to be safe, he’d bring the gun.

  He wouldn’t use it. They wouldn’t plan on using it. But what if the other guy shows up and he’s got a gun, too? Might as well be safe. It hurts nothing. Eddie might have thought the whole idea was dumb, but if Steven knew Father—and he thought he did—he’d make it seem like some kind of game and Eddie would go along with it.

  Okay, so now he had Eddie and Father Jim together, with the gun, at the lot. And there it stopped for him. Maybe they’d been goofing around, shooting at things, and there’d been a mistake, an accident, and after that Father had gotten scared. Sure, that made sense. Father didn’t plan to kill him. Steven could see how he’d feel, being like one of the family and all. And having to explain to Mom and Pop about the gun. They might see it as his—Father’s—fault. And it wouldn’t have been. It could easily have been an accident. . . .

  And how about this? Father burying Eddie in the Catholic cemetery, absolutely—he used the world “morally”—certain that Eddie hadn’t killed himself.

  For all of his carrying on, Father was first and foremost a priest—he would never have buried Eddie in sacred ground unless he knew for a fact he hadn’t committed suicide. And how could he know that if he hadn’t been there?

  Steven leaned his head back against the pillow. In the front of the house he heard his mother vacuuming.

  Mom. That was the whole problem now. Her thinking that Eddie had somehow rejected them all, didn’t love them enough. It was eating her up.

  And suddenly there it was! The solution to everything. It was easy to explain, although it would be pretty hard to do. Except Father Jim and he were friends and maybe it was time to break out of the kid thing and take Eddie’s place a little, be a little more adult. He wasn’t as good at arguing as Eddie, but he was way better than Mick, and if he could only catch Father in the right mood, and alone, he might be able to get to him.

  See? All Father had to do, he figured, was tell Mom. That’s all. Not Pop. Not Hardy or anybody else. Mom was closer to Father, was more likely to forgive him. And that would be that. And he—Steven—would be the one who’d pulled it all together. For Mom. So she could start being okay again, and maybe find some room to fit him into her feelings.

  Convincing Father to tell Mom, that would be the hard part. But really all he had to do was make Father realize how it had affected Mom, how she would certainly continue to waste away. Like him, like Eddie had been, Father couldn’t stand it when Mom was unhappy. So all he had to do was make it clear to him that she was miserable, and why.

  But first he had to make sure it had happened the way he’d figured it, and there was a way to do that. Just ask Father.

  Hardy watched Glitsky disappear into the hallway. A guy sitting at a desk nearby, having heard Glitsky’s heated exchange with Hardy, nodded after the sergeant and said he thought a blow job would be out of the question, and Hardy went back to Abe’s cubicle to get his stuff and return the Walkman.

  He still wanted verification on the voice prints. But, hey, he thought, I want to win the lottery, too. Still, the voice comparison looked doable.

  The room had gone back to its business. There was somebody there, he was sure, that he could hit on and get the thing done as a favor. Everybody by now knew he was a friend of Abe’s. Whether that was good or bad was a toss-up.

  He stood, leaning against the particleboard that defined Abe’s space. Lieutenant Joe Frazelli opened his door far to Hardy’s right, scanned the room and called out a couple of names.

  Two guys sitting at desks facing each other doing paperwork stopped and got up. “Yo,” one of them said.

  Hardy thought the woman he’d gotten the Walkman from was promising. She sat about midway between Glitsky’s cubicle and the lieutenant’s office, where the door had just opened, so Hardy found himself walking parallel to the two guys, back toward Frazelli. He was just about to open his mouth to the woman when he heard the lieutenant say: “We got an apparent suicide over at St. Elizabeth’s Church. You know the place, out on Taraval? Carbon monoxide. You guys want to check it out? Get out of the office awhile?”

  Behind Hardy, another voice called out. “Hey, Joe, where was that?”

  Frazelli looked right through Hardy at the voice behind him. “St. Elizabeth’s.”

  Hardy saw Griffin saying something to another guy in his cubicle. When he turned back to Frazelli he saw Hardy standing there, staring at him. He spoke to the two officers who had been on their way to the lieutenant’s office. “You guys mind if me and Vince take it? It might tie with something we’re on.”

  “Sure, it’s yours,” one of them said.

  Hardy spoke up. “I’m gonna tag along.”

  Griffin said, “It’s a free country.”

  Steven woke up alert. The pills didn’t seem to be knocking him out as bad as they had. Or maybe it was that there was so much for him to think about. Probably that was it.

  The vacuuming had stopped. He heard
his mother messing around in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, emptying the dishwasher. It was something how quiet the house was with no TV or radio going, no records on, Mom not humming or singing while she worked. She’d stopped doing that, and she used to do it all the time.

  In the quiet, the quiet deepened. Mom wasn’t moving at all, maybe just leaning against the counter, or sitting at the table. The telephone rang and he heard her say: “Oh, hi, Jim.” She paused. “What’s the matter?”

  Steven reached for the extension phone by his bed and picked up the receiver in time to hear Father Jim saying: “. . . can’t believe this is happening again, right on top of . . .”

  It sounded like he was crying.

  “Mom,” Steven said, “I’m on the extension.”

  “Hang up, Steven.”

  “I want to talk to Father Jim.”

  “He can’t talk now.”

  Father said, “It’s okay. Hi, Steven.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Steven, you hang up,” his mom repeated. “You can talk when we’re finished.”

  “Okay, don’t forget,” he said.

  What was the boy saying?

  Cavanaugh shook his head, trying to clear it. The first two black-and-white squad cars were out by the garage with a distraught Father Dietrick and a confused Father Paul. It had seemed to Cavanaugh to be an eminently logical thing to do—excuse himself to call Erin, his best friend and confidante. He’d establish, with Erin, how badly Rose’s suicide had torn him up. Especially now, hard on the heels of Eddie. So that any suspicion that he might have killed Rose would have to get around Erin’s testimony. He had figured that between Father Dietrick swearing Rose had been depressed and Erin describing how he, Cavanaugh, had been deeply hurt but not altogether surprised by the suicide, he would have covered all the bases.

  So he had called Erin. But then her son wanted to talk.

  And now Steven was saying to him that he knew all about it, describing it so closely it made him dizzy, as though he were about to topple from some great height. Steven sounding so much like Eddie. It was frightening, almost as though Eddie had come back to haunt him. And all of it whispered, not wanting Erin to hear.

  He looked out at the garage again. Six men in uniform—four cops and two priests. A paramedic’s van, or the coroner’s, pulled into the driveway, went past the kitchen and continued out over the asphalt.

  Steven was saying: “You know?”

  He had to ask what. It was all about Steven understanding and having to tell Erin, all coming out jumbled, or sounding that way to him. Words in a torrent that was drowning him. Steven might even be making a point, but it was blunted by his own onset of panic.

  All he knew was that once again, after having to do what he did to Rose . . .

  He couldn’t think about that. Even for a minute. This was Steven Cochran, Eddie’s brother. He couldn’t do that to Erin another time. No, he couldn’t. If he did, that would really be the end of it.

  But if he didn’t, it would all come out, and he could never ever see Erin again.

  He heard himself saying, after Steven had finished, “Can I talk to your mother again?”

  “You’re not going to tell her now, are you?”

  “Steven, come on,” he said, putting a light edge on it, “I promised.”

  Did he? It would have been seconds ago, but he didn’t remember.

  He stretched his neck to look out to the street. Dietrick had parked in front of the rectory, not in the back where all the commotion was. The spare keys to that car hung on the same peg by the kitchen door that the spare garage key had hung on.

  Then Erin’s voice: “Jim?”

  He could easily explain when he got back that he’d just needed to clear his head, take a walk.

  “Listen, I know this is an imposition but . . .” He struggled with the words. “But if you could come over here? I’m all . . . I don’t know. It would help me a lot.”

  She didn’t answer right away. He didn’t wonder she thought about it—another suicide so close on the heels of her son. But when Erin was needed she came through. Except in one thing, for him. But he wasn’t thinking about that now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forget it. I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s not fair to you.”

  “No, it’s not that,” she said, covering, white-lying. “I was just thinking about Steven.” He said nothing, letting her work on herself. “All right, Jim. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  As soon as he hung up he took Dietrick’s spare keys from the peg, walked through the rectory and out the front door. The car, a year-old Honda Accord, started right away. The drive to the Cochrans’ took under three minutes. If he hurried and timed it right, he could take care of things and be back here in fifteen.

  34

  FATHER PAUL SAT on the asphalt in the shade thrown by the garage, his back up against the building. Father Dietrick had propped himself up on the hood of one of the police cars and sat as though sleeping, his arms crossed over his cassock.

  Once, in his second mission, Father Paul had come to his destination, a village of Tukuna Indians just outside of Tabatinga where Brazil met Peru (as though the national boundaries made any difference that far up the Amazon). He had arrived, alone, in time to witness the public execution of a thief, where in a carnival atmosphere most of the men of the tribe gathered around in a circle, keeping the condemned man inside their perimeter, closing in and beating him with heavy sticks, poking at his face, his eyes and throat, his groin. When the man finally went down, everybody, male and female—from the smallest child to the oldest grandmother—took a turn swatting at the prostrate figure until he wasn’t much more than a smear on the dusty and rutted road.

  Something about his timing, he thought. His bowels were hurting from the airplane food, and the culture shock here, with ubiquitous death here, too, in this civilized place, was almost harder to take than that execution had been. These trips home to ask for money—one every blessed two years—were supposed to recharge his batteries. Food, wine, conversation, a surcease from the endless monotony and misery of the bush.

  But too much time in the bush, Father Paul was beginning to realize, and it got inside you. All these trappings of civilization—the asphalt, the beautiful church, the grass on the lawns, cars, clothes, everything—were just artifacts. Not necessarily phony but inessential to what was most human—the coping with mortality, the fear of being alone, the need to love.

  He missed his woman, Sarita, badly.

  But that was, in theory, why they sent you home—so that you didn’t become one of the tribe. So you remembered what it was you were trying to do, which was bring the message of Jesus Christ to impoverished people and somehow convince them, since there was no hope in changing their situation, that there was at least nobility and holiness in it.

  Father Paul sighed, sweating even in the shade. He feared he was losing his faith in God, that he might even already be a Marxist. Coming upon a death like this, in the first moments of what was supposed to be a vacation, had the strength of a message, and the message was: “Don’t get too caught up in what looks like the security of the civilized world. The whole thing is pretty tenuous.”

  He got up. In the garage no one had moved the woman. Even though there were four policemen in uniform and three medical people of some kind, no one seemed inclined to do anything. The officials stood around in two groups, making chitchat.

  He walked over to Father Dietrick, who still leaned against a car with his arms folded. On the way down from the airport they had passed the time pleasantly enough—Dietrick fascinated, as only someone who had never traveled could be, by Father Paul’s account of his latest mission, the journey back. He was exactly what was expected—a likable young man (but they were about the same age!) with an anchorman’s glib enthusiasm and sincerity whom Father Paul could tolerate because tolerance of the essentially benign was something he believed in.

  “I wou
ld think they’d move her,” Father Paul said.

  Dietrick opened his eyes, squinting in the sun. “This is a hell of a welcome, isn’t it?”

  Father Paul wondered at what point refusal to break out of social conventions stopped being benign and became a deliberate refusal to take responsibility. But he said: “Might they let us give her last rites?”

  Dietrick said, “She’s already dead.”

  He nodded. “Well, I’ll ask anyway. Couldn’t hurt.”

  At that moment, just as Father Paul was turning to speak to the policemen, two more cars pulled into sight by the rectory and began crossing the lot. The blue American car pulled up beside the van and stopped. Two men, casually dressed, got out. The other car, a Jeeplike machine with a canvas top rolled back, drove almost into the garage. The driver of that car had an intensity that was totally different from the rest of the group. He fairly jumped from behind the wheel and walked quickly over to where he and Dietrick stood.

  A flash of formal smile, gone immediately. “Where’s Father Cavanaugh?”

  Dietrick spoke up. “He went in to make a call.”

  “He’s in the rectory?”

  Father Dietrick, helpful, smiled. “Should be.”

  The man nodded. The two men from the American car had spoken to the uniformed police for a minute. Now they were walking into the garage. The man from the Jeep followed them, and Father Paul trailed behind.

  Rose lay as if sleeping, still sitting up, her head forward on her chest.

  “Calm enough,” one of the Americans said. “Just went to sleep,” the other responded. “That’s the way to go.”

  The Jeep person said: “Why’s she on that side of the car?”

  “What?”

  “Why isn’t she behind the steering wheel?”

  The two Americans looked at each other. Father Paul, suddenly, wondered about that himself. It was odd. There she had been for maybe a half hour and nobody had noticed that. Maybe they all saw what they expected to see.